Why not retvrn men to subsistence farming?
The GOP is actively trying to impoverish the entire globe in the vain hope that a few low-skill, low-education Rust Belt male swing voters will return to work at a domestic assembly line. Really.
“We believe that a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job,” sputtered friend of the newsletter J.D. Vance.
These chuds often dress this up as “helping” the “traditional family.”
One problem with this claim is that the “traditional family” has nothing to do with factory work. The vast majority of humans throughout space and time have been subsistence farmers.
Why not retvrn to that?
After all, the New Right is enamored of tradwives, organic foods, made-from-scratch home cooking, microfarming, homesteading, raising livestock for food, living self-sufficiently, the simple life, building, fixing, planting, preserving, and composting (as a recent David French column highlights).
What could be more all of that shit above, and traditional, than subsistence farming?
Now, there are downsides to subsistence farming. As the word “subsistence” hints, this is not a path to wealth. It’s more like grinding poverty. French uses the word “freedom” to describe farm life. In reality, it’s significantly less free for the people who don’t want to have to slaughter animals with their bare hands in order to meet their protein requirements. There’s also the high infant mortality rate to consider. And the early deaths, low levels of leisure time, higher levels of violence, lower levels of education, lower levels of happiness, and higher levels of repression which are associated with lower levels of economic growth inextricably linked with subsistence farming (and declines in global trade).
“Generations of farmers and factory workers worked extremely hard to send their kids to college so that they wouldn’t endure the same hardships they endured — whether it was laboring on a farm from dawn to dusk or engaging in physical labor until their bodies were broken at a young age,” French wrote.
Colorado farmers are killing themselves at such a high rate the state made a documentary about it.
“Reindustrialization” isn’t much better.
“There’s an additional moral dimension to the trade war,” French wrote. “Deriding cheap goods is a luxury belief. Standards of living rise not just when wages increase. They also rise when prices decrease. A working-class American now possesses goods that would be completely out of reach if they were manufactured in American factories paying American wages.”
Here’s a question I have for anyone ready to take some short-term pain for some long-term gain to help the menfolk. Do you trust Vance to actually help low-skill, low-education Rust Belt male swing voters?
Let’s look at his track record. Fiveish years ago, Vance raised $93 million to launch Narya Capital, a VC firm that he claimed was focused on startups based in the Midwest. One of his recipients was AcreTrader, which facilitates sales of rural US land to Chinese investors.
As far as I can tell, Narya Capital has yet to create a single farm or factory job in Ohio, or anywhere in the US. Vance was out of there by the summer of 2021 when he handed the firm’s reins to a partner from Darien, Connecticut so he could run for office. This, despite having explicitly promised investors he wouldn’t. Sure, he’ll lie to investors. But he wouldn’t lie to unemployed Rust Belt men.
Politicians lie. I get that. They say they won’t raise your taxes, and then do. Or they raise fees instead. It’s awful. But in this case, they’re promising global immiseration for… factory work? That's not even a good deal if they could deliver it. The only thing we’re likely to get is less trade, more poverty, and more corruption. Oh, and more innocent people abducted and deported to overseas torture prisons without due process.
Between 1965 and 2010 the US lost around six million manufacturing jobs. I care about the laid off factory workers who took lower-quality service jobs after the “China shock” as much as the next person. But the tariffs are already hurting domestic manufacturing employment. I just feel like there’s got to be a way to help them that doesn’t involve higher infant mortality rates.
I’ve suggested checks. I’m open to other options. Really, just about anything other than this.
I feel like it's a cousin of "he won't really do what he says." There's this version of denial where you talk about the toasters not being worth the jobs, but still think, in reality, nothing will actually change and you'll still have your cheap toaster.
But it's harder to deny once you say subsistence.
Fascism is an aesthetic, not an idea. Clocking in at your factory job is part of the aesthetic. Subsistence farming isn't.
(I always like to imagine today's Nazis clocking in at that factory job in the 50s, where they'll work next to a tough-as-nails WW2 vet who won't tolerate their trash very long.
Learning about the extent to which it’s possible for a woman to take for granted her privileged reality is THE reason why I stay subscribed to your Substack. This subject is clearly on your mind a lot, and it’s clear, throughout your articles, that you hold yourself above those whom you deem lesser than yourself. This, contrary to what your arrogant ego tells you, is a fiction… in reality, the “unskilled” labour you’re referring to requires a degree of skill that you would falter and fail to achieve even 10% of. In a free, and therefore intrinsically competitive market, there is NO such thing as “unskilled labour”. The blue collar men you so love to shit on would talk you under a table with two hands full of ho (a hoe in the right, and you in the left).